LAURA HOLLIS: Hollywood surprisingly takes on abortion

The last time I wrote about the FX vampire series, "The Strain," I commented on the repulsive amorality of its teen protagonist Zach Goodweather, who decided to detonate a nuclear bomb, killing untold numbers of people in New York City, because he was mad at daddy.

The series recently wrapped up, and I enjoyed it. But I was surprised by a strongly pro-life message buried in one of the last episodes of the final season.

Leading up to that episode, a character named Sanjay Desai has been collaborating with the vampires, who are now in control of New York and purportedly in a joint government with humans known as "The Partnership."

Desai has been tasked with managing a Partnership facility that appears to be a home for pregnant women. But unknown to many — although not to Desai — in the back of the facility is an abattoir in which humans who are deemed unworthy to live are brought in, hung on hooks like slabs of meat and drained of their blood to feed the vampires.

Even the "pregnancy home" front is a brutal ruse. The young women there are being impregnated so their babies can be taken at birth and drained for the vampires.

As episode nine opens, Desai has been captured by two of the show's main characters: Vasily Fet and Kristen "Dutch" Velders, who are trying to find and kill the head vampire ("The Master"). Dutch has escaped from Desai's facility, but not before seeing what went on there.

Fet confronts Desai about his despicable collaboration with the vampires, and Desai tries to justify his decisions. He argues that society is "better off," given the humans who have been "sacrificed."

The notion of expendable humans, including the "draining rooms" and the vampire farms of human cattle seen in earlier episodes, weren't surprising. The theme of the Holocaust runs throughout the series. Primary character Abraham Setrakian is a Holocaust survivor who first encounters The Master while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and hunts him for decades thereafter.

But the next bit of dialogue stunned me.

Dutch yells at Desai, "You let them take Sophie's baby and drain it!"

"Come on," he says. "If we're going to be absolutely, brutally honest, a newborn baby is hardly worth that of a fully developed adult. It's not even self-aware..."

Dutch's character is hardly a paragon of traditional morality, but this is beyond the limits of her tolerance. Shrieking an epithet at Desai, Dutch violently punches him in the face multiple times.

I had to rewind and rewatch the scene. I couldn't believe Hollywood scriptwriters would dare present — as evil, mind you — the rationalizations for infanticide.

Sanjay Desai's monologue is a string of their talking points: the unborn child isn't fully human; it's just a "fetus," "the product of conception" or "a clump of cells"; any reason a woman wants is good enough to have an abortion; the mother's life is worth more than the child's.

And for that, his character gets the crap beaten out of him.

I thought of this scene again when I read a recent news item. Michigan abortionist Michael Roth lost his license for one year after a 2015 car accident that revealed containers with aborted baby parts in Roth's car, along with the illegally obtained drugs fentanyl and ciprofloxacin.

Michael Roth is just following in the footsteps of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose grisly conduct the American press was shamed into covering. And then there are the videos released two years ago by the Center for Medical Progress, which revealed some of Planned Parenthood's repulsive practices, including the sale of aborted baby body parts for scientific research.

"The Strain" may be fiction. But the backrooms of Planned Parenthood and America's other abortion clinics are just as bloody.

Subcribe to the Times

Reporting like this is brought to you by a staff of experienced local journalists committed to telling the stories of your community.
Support from subscribers is vital to continue our mission.